The Books of Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona, northern Italy in 84 BCE and died in Rome in 54 BCE. Little detail about his life survives. What is known is inferred from the poems or from indirect secondary sources. He was a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, the latter a friend of his father, and an immediate antecedent of the Augustan poets Horace, Propertius and Ovid. His surviving poems are among the finest lyric verse of ancient Rome.

Simon Smith has published five collections of poetry. His third collection, Mercury (Salt), was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry, appeared from Shearsman in 2016, and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage, 2016). He is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow in 2009, and a judge of the National Poetry Prize in 2004. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.